[The soundtrack for this post can be found at Youtube]
Cory Fowler is the Canadian MVP for Windows Azure, an ObjectSharp Consultant, and a good friend of mine. He will be presenting on Windows Azure at, you guessed it, AzureFest! We have two half day events on December 11th 2010 (two days from now – see what I did there?) at Microsoft’s office in Mississauga and it’s chock full of everything you need to know about getting started with Windows Azure. You can register by clicking here.
What You'll Learn
- How to setup your Azure Account
- How to take a traditional on-premise ASP.NET applications and deploy it to Azure
- Publishing Applications to Azure Developer Portal
- Setting up the Azure SDK and Azure Tools for Visual Studio on your laptop
- using the development App Fabric
We Provide
- The tools you will need on your machine to prepare yourself for Azure
- Hands on instruction and expert assistance
- Power and network access
- Snacks and refreshments
- For every azure activation – funding for your User Group
- Post event technical resources so you can take your skills to the next level
You Provide
- Your own laptop
- Your own credit card (for Azure activations this is required, even if you only setup for a trial period, but this event is free!)
- Your experience in building ASP.NET Applications and Services
Seats are still available. Register!
P.S. Did I mention this event is free?
Last night a couple people asked where I got all the neat VS2010 desktop backgrounds. I couldn’t remember the URL off the top of my head last night, but the website is http://vs2010wallpapers.com/. There are a lot of great backgrounds. My favorite though is the ducky. 
Just came across this on the Decrypt my World blog. It seems a lot of Microsoft developers are asked for code samples and for lots of valid reasons they can’t provide them. So Microsoft is fixing that by opening up a service where you can request code samples for any Microsoft technologies.
Here is the official word on what it is:
Developers are encouraged to submit code sample requests dealing with any Microsoft development technologies to our site. At the same time, developers can now vote for newly submitted or existing code sample topics. Here’s the exciting part! Microsoft engineers will then pick the requests with the highest number of votes and provide the code samples. It’s all FREE!
You can find the full write-up here: http://1code.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=NEW%2c%20FREE%20Code%20Sample%20Request%20Service%20from%20Microsoft%20All-In-One%20Code%20Framework